Digital Marketing Channels for B2B Businesses

A digital marketing channel is a route for delivering marketing materials. Digital marketing channels are becoming an increasingly important part of marketing strategy as traditional methods of advertising become less favorable. Before looking at the top three channels for businesses, it’s important to understand the key benefits of B2B digital marketing channels.  

Cost-effective: Digital marketing can fit into the budget of most businesses. Marketing avenues such as email campaigns, social media advertising, and website content can be created at a low cost.  

Accessible analytics: Most digital marketing channels have some way to track analytics. There are also multiple tools like Google Analytics that can aid businesses in tracking data. Accessible analytics for digital marketing channels allow businesses to choose strategies that work and cut costs for those that do not.  

Increase brand awareness: Digital marketing channels allow businesses to appear in search results. The higher a business in search results, the easier it is to increase brand awareness. Having a pronounced digital presence allows customers to learn more about a business and possibly recommend it to others.  

Fast results: Digital marketing strategies can create growth quickly. A method like pay-per-click advertising on social media can show results within days. Digital marketing channels are great for businesses that need a marketing boost and sustained growth.  

Top three digital marketing channels  

1. Social media

Social Media is one of the key delivery channel for marketing materials. Image courtesy of Social Media Councils

It turns out, the most prevalent digital marketing channel for B2B marketing is social media, with 75% of B2B organizations using social media marketing. Moreover, as of January, 2023, 59.4% of the world uses social media. This means social media is a suitable place to get in front of the right audiences. It’s crucial that businesses choose the right social media platform for their niche.  

Many B2B businesses will find that LinkedIn fits their needs best with it being the largest professional network. Audiences on LinkedIn are there for career/business growth, and professional connections making it perfect for B2B marketing. That said, the same engineers who spend time on LinkedIn also spend time on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Therefore it is important to diversify and maintain presence on key platforms.

Regardless of the social media platform, it is possible to yield beneficial results. Social media can be used as a digital marketing channel in multiple ways, from running ads to building connections. Did you know that FindLight is actually on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. We use these channels to curate highly engaging topics on physics, robotics, photonics, cosmology, astronomy, and nanotechnology. It helps us stay in touch with our audience and drive thought leadership on key technology topics. 

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Search engine optimization or SEO ensures that a website is visible to the right audience. SEO is a terrific way to build organic traffic to a website. SEO optimization shortens the process of generating leads. If someone happens to find a website of a business that fits their needs, no one needs to go through the process of convincing them to seek information about a company.  

B2B SEO strategy should be about the people your business is trying to reach. Ultimately people are doing the search even in B2B marketing. As a business trying to optimize SEO, it is important to think about what the business is offering, what kind of people it needs to reach, and how to appear as high quality to search engines.  Below are a few ways to boost your SEO traffic:

Build a blog 

Many businesses begin blogs with SEO-optimized content. Many blogging platforms have built-in plug-ins for SEO optimization. This makes the SEO optimized blogging process easier and allows for easy tracking of optimization. When creating an SEO-optimized blog it is important to post consistently. Consistent content means a business will always be supplying fresh content and therefore more likely to yield positive results.  

Transform blog content into video content  

YouTube is a search engine. This means that it is a worthy platform to improve a business’s searchability. A straightforward way to use YouTube as a search engine is to repurpose blog content for high-quality video content. Video content should be valuable, and high quality not just high in quantity. It’s important to make content that an audience will find helpful, and informative. Content can be optimized on YouTube in multiple ways, the platform offers categories, hashtags, and descriptions which can be optimized similar to a blog post.  

Gather backlinks  

Linking to your content is called link building and tells Google that it is worthy of being seen. When Google notices that a link is featured on multiple websites it begins to consider it as quality content. There are many methods to backlink building. If a business has recently posted a blog post and happens to have a newsletter, then the business can tell its subscribers about the new post. Social media sites often have places for businesses to add links. There are also backlinks which are like votes from other websites that signal to search engines that content is valuable. Backlinks are a slightly more complicated method of link building, but worth looking into for digital marketing strategy.  

3. Pay Per Click  

Pay-Per-Click or PPC advertising is a paid form of advertising. These ads can be found on social media, at the top of a search engine results page, and on other platforms with visual ad displays. PPC allows businesses to easily target a unique subset of the population. This kind of advertising allows a business to target a specific audience. They also allow every company to advertise on a budget as they allow users to set a daily budget. It’s also cost-effective because conversions are easy to track, and therefore it’s easy to get rid of campaigns or keywords that produce low conversions.  

While a channel like SEO or social media content can take longer to plan, create and manage, PPC yields quick results and is easy to manage.  Here are a few ways you can use the PPC approach:

Adjust ads by platform 

When using PPC advertising it is important to customize them by platform. Ads on social media platforms will likely be more visual and include less text. Social media may also require different keywords. If a PPC ad is being displayed on a desktop it will need to look different than it would on a mobile phone. There are many working pieces that must be considered when considering PPC advertising.  

Conversions aren’t everything  

Although conversions are important in deciding the success of ads there are other important components. A business should also consider if engagement has increased with its brand. After an ad runs on LinkedIn, is the business receiving more followers? When using PPC it’s important to keep multiple metrics in mind to create a larger picture of progression.  

In Summary

The top three most popular digital marketing channels, which are social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) are great tools to add to your marketing strategy. Social media is effective for reaching audiences and building connections, SEO increases organic traffic to your own website, and PPC allows businesses to target specific audiences and track conversions. Adding these digital channels to your marketing strategy can help your business increase sales and brand awareness if used correctly.

You can also increase brand awareness and sales by signing up as a vendor on FindLight – an engineering marketplace where buyers are connected with leading suppliers worldwide. If you are interested here is a quick link to get started for free.